Steak - Mark Schatzker [8]
O’Brien has big plans for Texas Beef. He wants to build a biodigester, which is a big high-tech fermentation tank that will somehow derive electricity from the tons and tons of manure. He just spent $6 million on a new feed mill. I walked into one of several shiny aluminum bays, large enough to park a dump truck, where O’Brien will store ingredients—mainly corn. The mill itself is a small industrial complex of tubes and silos where whole kernels of corn are steamed, flaked, and mixed with other feed additives. It takes eight hours to manufacture enough feed for nearly fifty thousand cows to eat in a single day.
Cows spend about five months at Texas Beef eating and crapping, after which they walk out five hundred pounds heavier than when they arrived. Every week, two thousand graduate. They step onto a semi and are shipped to a slaughterhouse fifteen miles away in Cactus, Texas, which is owned by a large corporation called Swift, which is itself owned by a much larger Brazilian company called JBS—the biggest meat processor in the world. There, they are killed, de-hided, and sliced into cuts. The cuts are sealed in plastic, packed in boxes, and loaded onto trucks that fan out from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Not far from Texas Beef, O’Brien has an eight-thousand-acre farm where he grows wheat. A herd of wild pronghorn antelope had recently discovered that wheat and started helping themselves. We pulled into one of his fields and found pronghorns grazing on profit margins. Compared with corn-fattened cattle, pronghorn antelope are a vision of elegance. They are have dainty hooves, shapely bodies, and delicate, aerodynamic faces. As good as pronghorn antelope are at eating O’Brien’s wheat, they are even better at running. Up until about twenty thousand years ago, they lived a high-strung life, getting chased on a daily basis by the now extinct American cheetah. No animal on the continent can run as fast. If a pronghorn buck bolted through the nearby town of Dumas, he would get pulled over for speeding.
O’Brien demonstrated. He pulled onto the wheat field, which had been baked to an asphaltlike hardness by the Texas sun, and gunned the Lexus. The pronghorns dispersed, trotting this way and that. Bill nosed the car forward, and now they took off, their hind legs flicking back and forth at a rate reminiscent of an industrial sewing machine’s. We kept up for a few seconds, but the antelope would dart in one direction and then another, and it didn’t take long until they were behind us, the herd reformed, all of them back to an easy trot. As far as handling goes, a sporty Lexus has nothing on an extinct cheetah.
O’Brien pulled back onto the highway, and the pronghorns returned to their eating. There wasn’t a mammalian heart that wasn’t beating faster. I asked O’Brien how pronghorn antelope taste. “Gamy” was his answer.
Some twenty miles southwest of Texas Beef is the O’Brien family ranch. Centuries ago in Andalusia, Spain, a rancho referred to a hut where a cattle herder could grab some shut-eye. In America, the word became “ranch” and came to denote something considerably grander. O’Brien’s is situated next to a formerly rough-and-tumble old town called Tascosa, which used to boast no fewer than four brothels. Nearby is a cemetery, and one of the headstones contains the following epitaph:
Frenchie McCormack
Aug 11 1852
Jan 12 1941
Madame at Whore House
The ranch sits on a hilly and parched section of land near the Canadian River, which has carved out moments of inspiring grandeur from the West Texas limestone. Not far away is a box canyon where Billy the Kid used to hide stolen horses, and we rode out there on ATVs to have a look. O’Brien’s granddaughter accompanied him while I followed along behind, nearly tumbling over a small cliff. We stopped at the top of the canyon on an outcropping of smooth rock and took in the fine view. In the rock beneath